NEW YORK—In Vancouver, they had bracelets. They looked like watches, simple ones, all black except for a blue line along the wristband and the red numbers on the face. They monitored wrist movement, and therefore how much players slept, when they slept — on the bus? On the plane? — and how well. The Canucks all wore them. That helped, right?

“Yeah, I couldn’t go out for a beer after the game,” says Willie Mitchell, the Los Angeles Kings defenceman who was in Vancouver when they experimented with sleep science. “They’re actually biofeedback devices on your wrist, so we sent one of the rookies back to the hotel and had his wear 25 of ’em.”

If you are playing hockey right now, you are tired. The Los Angeles Kings became the first team in the modern era to win three seven-game series and make the Stanley Cup final; the New York Rangers, slackers that they are, played one fewer on the way here. No team had ever gone the full seven in the first two rounds and won the Cup. This year, someone will.

This may explain the sloppy work by the Kings in Games 1 and 2, and for that matter, some looser-than-normal play from the Rangers. Sure, the ice in L.A. was a mess. And Game 1 went to overtime, before double overtime in Game 2. It’s hard to get this far.

“You can get IVs, those work best,” said Kings defenceman Drew Doughty before Game 3 of the Stanley Cup final. “And obviously just crushing waters and Gatorades and stuff like that. A lot of it is just getting rest, too. I’m the best couch-sitter in the world. I can sit there all day, so I make sure to do that a lot.”

Mitchell tweeted out a picture of the team plane, where between seats he had set up a makeshift bed, full of white blankets and pillows. Apparently most Kings slept, a lot. As defenceman Alec Martinez put it, “We’re not that highbrow. We can sleep on the floor.”

“When you switch west coast to east coast, and you guys do that all the time too, you know that your sleep schedule kind of gets messed up,” says Mitchell. “So I’m a big believer in taking it when you can get it, because sometimes you get here and you can’t sleep at night. And if you can get two, three hours on the flight out east, you grab it then. And that was kind of the case. I’m sure the Rangers were doing the same thing.”

The Rangers, though, are one of the two least-travelled teams in the league, along with the Islanders, while the Kings rank in the top five for mileage. That being said, at this time of year, there are those who eschew the notion that the way NHL players travel is too exhausting.

“On a plane I’m sitting in a chair 36,000 feet in the air — I think Louis C.K. talks about that,” said Martinez. “I mean, if you’re complaining about that, you’ve got problems.”

Comedian Louis C.K. did the famous bit about how we take air travel for granted, which included this passage: “People like to say there’s delays on flights. Delays? Really? New York to California in five hours. That used to take 30 years to do that and a bunch of you would die on the way there and have a baby. You’d be with a whole different group of people by the time you got there.”

That being said, a significant group of NHL media took a Delta flight from LAX Sunday that was supposed to take off at 9 a.m., and after a soul-destroying voyage, the plane door wouldn’t open when they finally landed at JFK at 3 a.m. Courage.

The Kings and Rangers haven’t faced that, yet. But the need to ramp up the emotional engine again and again, more than any team in history, takes its toll. Montreal had no emotion to start Game 1 against the Rangers after topping the Bruins in seven. The Kings were slow to start Game 1 in this series after Game 7 against Chicago, but Kings coach Darryl Sutter says they were better, scoreboard aside, in Game 2. It’s a tournament of the fittest, in every way.

“I think the longer series go, the longer the playoffs go, (it’s about) courage, determination, extra effort,” Sutter said. “You’re never going to feel fresh. You’re never going to feel as good as you did in November. That’s the way it works. That’s for sure. They’re people.” Doughty put it another way, though: “The heart doesn’t get tired.”

“I think there’s teams that can, and teams that can’t,” says Mitchell. “And I think the great teams are the ones that manage their game and find a way when you’re in that situation, and fortunately for us we’ve been able to do that over the course of the past few years.

“Look at the great teams. You look at Detroit — when they had all their success, you’re telling me they had their A game every night? No. It’s those good team that can find a way to win when you don’t have your A game every night, and that’s the difference-maker. We’ll look for our A game tonight, right?”

You, and the other guys. Good luck.

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